So, for those of you who don’t know exactly how self-publishing works, here’s some insight.

Those nicely coordinated releases where a book hits everywhere at once? It doesn’t happen for me.

The problem is, is that except for a few places (namely Kobo, ARe and RainbowEbooks) unless you’re a major publishing house, you cannot upload an ebook to be released at a future date, the creating a pre-order page or even just obtaining a URL to which you can direct buyers to in advance. At Amazon, Barnes & Noble, SmashWords, and I believe Itunes, the moment it is uploaded and approved, it goes live.

This makes it very hard to conduct a coordinated release. If you upload to ARe and RainbowBooks and SmashWords, it goes live immediately. But Amazon might take 12-24 hours (48 internationally) to approve your upload and create your product page. B&N and Kobo can take up to 72, and Itunes can take a couple weeks.

Believe me, this makes it tough to coordinate release-day reviews, because what I need to do is get the ARC to reviewers weeks in advance, but they won’t have purchase links to put on their post. So then I upload the files as close to release day as possible in order to have them approved and have a URL for the book at Amazon or wherever, and then email the purchase links to reviewers sometimes less than 24 hours before their review is due to go live. It’s really quite annoying and life would be infinitely easier if every site would let you upload in advance and schedule a future date for the files to go live.

The point to all this rambling is to inform you that today I will begin uploading to Amazon and B&N. The files have already been uploaded and approved at Kobo, but of course, there I can schedule an offset release date. The files have also been uploaded to Itunes as of several days ago, but last I checked they hadn’t yet been approved for distribution and might not be for some time yet.

What this means is that Velocity might go live on Amazon and B&N sometime today or tomorrow, before the “official” release date. So if you’re an early bird, you might just be able to snag a copy.

If you’re holding off for ARe or Rainbow Ebooks, I’m sorry but those will not be going live until Saturday. The reason for this is that my sales took a significant hit with the release of Acceleration going the pre-order route at ARe. It turns out, unless you’re a hugely popular, well-known author, people aren’t that interested in pre-ordering an upcoming release. The times at ARe that I’ve made the most sales have been when my book was both live and near the top of the New Releases list. If I were to upload it for pre-order, it would have fallen to the bottom of the New Releases list before it ever actually went live. So, I’m holding off on those sites and will upload and release there on Saturday, the official release date.